Geography: South East, Kent. The eastern part of the Swale council area and part of the Maidstone council area.

Main population centres: Faversham, Bearsted, Shepway, Lenham.

Profile: This is probably the most disjointed seat in Kent - the county`s comunication lines tend to run west to east, along the A2/M2 north of the North Downs and M20 below them. Faversham and Mid Kent runs counter to this, including the town of Faversham in the Swale council area, then stretching south across the North Downs and through little country roads to take in the rural villages around Maidstone, the villages along the M20 and the suburbs of Maidstone itself, such as Shepway and Bearsted.

Politics: A safe Conservative seat, held by the party since its creation in 1997.

Current MP

HELEN WHATELEY (Conservative) Educated at Micklefield School and Oxford University. Contested Kingston and Surbiton 2010. First elected as MP for Faversham & Mid Kent in 2015.

I’ve been up the allotment & didn’t realise Hugh Robertson had been sacked. That comes of something of a surprise, seeing that he was in many ways quite an effective Sports Minister, but perhaps it had been surmised that he could not realistically be promoted any further, and it wasn’t fair to keep him at this ministerial rank. He’s past 50 now after all. Note that he hasn’t been given Privy Council status, which is sometimes an indicator that a minister is or isn’t going up the ladder.
This seat was fairly close (though still fairly comfortably Conservative) in 1997, when Andrew Rowe was still around. An untutored observer might have surmised that the seat was Labour Faversham versus Tory mid-Kent – after all, Faversham had had a Labour MP for a long time after WWII – but in fact Faversham even in 1997 stayed very narrowly Tory, and instead it was from the very oddly-included Shepway estate in Maidstone whence the Labour vote mainly came. The Tories however still had enough votes in the small towns of Bearsted, Headcorn & Lenham (unless perhaps the last-named wasn’t included in the seat) to make sure that they held on. Nowadays Labour struggle to get any sort of majority even in the Shepway estate, although they have managed to get back a council presence in the area at least.

Seems that Robertson wasn’t sacked as reported earlier – he’s been moved to the Foreign Office.
Tory is quite likely correct. Labour has never previously formed a government without winning at least Dartford, though in February 1974 that was indeed Labour’s only seat in Kent. Dover is the most likely but if Labour is, say, 1 to 2% ahead of the Conservatives nationally it would be pretty likely that there would be a parliamentary majority, but no Labour MPs in Kent. But – and it could be quite a big but – many of these seats are quite volatile, and if Labour ends up with a statistically significant national lead it wouldn’t be that surprising if at least one Kent seat falls. Interestingly, in this year’s county council elections, Labour’s strongest seat in the county wasn’t Dover, but Gravesham. Of course, there weren’t any elections in most of Chatham & Aylesford, but I personally would have been surprised to see Labour ahead there either.

Well, perhaps the reports of Robertson being sacked were premature rather than wrong.

Cameron’s action in sacking both Robertson and next-door MP Damien Green do appear rather bizarre, hollowing out the bedrock of the Government for the sake of political correctness. And how many people would satnd up and say that the MP for Maidstone is a better minister than Roberston or Green?

I am tempted to say that this reshuffle shows how little Cameron knows or cares about the politics and interests of East Kent, with the posisble exception of Canterbury.

By the way, how many people these days, with the possible exception of their wives, cares if MPs get knighthoods?

Might one of them be Ann Widdecombe? Maybe after five years in which she has done little beyond making a prat of herself on Strictly Come Dancing and hosting the utterly forgettable Cleverdicks she might feel quite up for another spell on a cosy Westminster backbench…

Andy JS: Faversham & Mid-Kent, or at least where I live in Bearsted, doesn’t appear to be natural UKIP territory. UKIP might have done better here a few years ago off the back of Kent International Gateway, a proposed Channel Tunnel link designed to reduce motorway frieght in Kent. However those plans were cancelled a while ago now.

Helen was the candidate in Kingston and Surbiton in 2010 and so I got to spend a lot of time with her. Considering the different nature of the two seats (Lib Dem South West London vs Rural Tory Kent) I imagine she would adopt a more pragmatic view.

Good to see it’s a safe Tory seat. A bit disappointed Hugh isn’t standing- whatever they said about him, at least he’s local. A little annoyed with the shipping around of candidates. Candidate selection here smells a bit Tactical for the purpose of PCness given it is a safe Tory seat and all 4 potential candidates were female – using us to increase female Tory presence. Bet they wouldn’t dare do it in seats where there’s stiff competition from the likes of ukip. Also a bit cheesed at the complacency- I’ve not seen any hint of campaigning from anyone..

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